Indonesia adds another weapon to its speech-suppressing arsenal

AFTER A SLOW start, citizens of South-East Asian countries have in recent years taken to the internet with gusto, using it, like their counterparts everywhere else, to shop, to chat with their friends, to watch movies and to listen to music—and to criticise their governments. And as in many parts of the world, governments have found that they do not much like that last feature of this whole internet thing.

In response, many simply charge troublesome individuals using laws against age-old offences like treason, blasphemy and sedition. More thorough legislatures, such as Singapore’s, have passed new laws prohibiting “fake news”. Some governments are even more heavy-handed. Myanmar has lately been choking off access to the internet. Cambodia plans to set up a government-controlled “gateway” through which all internet traffic must pass, the better to inspect it for wrongthink. They are in the vanguard. Asian countries are “leading the way on digital censorship”, says Linda Lakhdhir of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group.

As South-East Asia’s most robust democracy, Indonesia might have been expected to buck this trend. But under President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, who has been in power since 2014, many senior officials have succumbed to what Ben Bland, the president’s biographer, calls “knee-jerk authoritarianism”. A...